doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com What is considered safe min wall thickness?

Just as an outsider looking in don�t you people think it is about time that the United States Government started and supported a firearms proofing system. It seems to me that such a large and advanced country who can spend billions of dollars on this that and the other project, but cannot find the time money or inclination to protect its citizens from dangerous firearms, be they home produced imported or just adjusted by the home user. We read about the United States having an extremely powerful gun lobby well what are you waiting for it won�t happen unless you ask!!!!!!!
Or is my suggestion to impossible for you shooting folks to insist on having, though I would sincerely like to know why in reality it cannot be done or is it just politics.

Will I have to keep my head down to miss the flak?

This subject has been brought up here on this forum in the past & ran into many "Heated" pages. The Vast Majority of "US" were violently opposed to the idea. The big problem here is unless any gun sold was proofed to SAAMI specs for the shells the Average consumer is going to buy the proof law would be virtually meaningless. Personally I am quite content to load for my 100 yr old guns to a lower pressure & don't want them subjected to a proof to handle SAAMI spec shells. The US companies have been doing quite well for many, many years handling their own proofing without any Government Interference & have built some of the sturdiest guns available anywhere. In short it is a subject best Dropped.
Note well, you never see any warnings concerning firing British or other European shells in US guns, its always the other way around & all their guns have been subject to proof laws since the Dark Ages.

How could we be so backward not to think of that?!

April 20 1895 Sporting Life
http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/SportingLife/1895/VOL_25_NO_04/SL2504014.pdf

July 27 1895
Call for Government Proof House for Nitro Powder Testing
http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/SportingLife/1895/VOL_25_NO_18/SL2518019.pdf

Your colonial inferiors unfortunately chose to turn gun safety assurance over to the personal injury lawyers

I would like to ask would it be possible for you colonists (though the word colonists is sort of anathema here because I was certainly under the impression that your colony left the room, after one of our king Georges governments committed one all mighty political faux pas over that product we British stole from those kind Chinese people while we were dealing drugs to them. But that is now water under the bridge I hope!) Would you indulge me a little more.
On this side of the pond �Tort� which is a law appertaining to civil wrongs and the catch all meaning of it is �you cannot plead ignorance of the law�. So if you adjust tamper or in any way fundamentally alter a firearm the law compels you to have it retested by the official body which is in our case �the proof house� failure to do this puts you in breach of our criminal law and Tort if you sold it on after you made the adjustments. Therefore you have no excuses when it comes to whatever action is taken against you be it criminal civil or both because you cannot plea ignorance of the Law.
Now if there are no Statutes appertaining to �Gun Proofing� on your side of the pond and a person tampers with a gun to such an extent that it is positively dangerous how can you take legal action against such a person because you would now have to prove that he intentionally made the firearm unsafe. To counteract your argument he could say that I did not know his actions would cause such a reaction because he does not have many engineering skills. This is a lawyer�s version of heaven or as close to one on earth as it is possible to be or is this subject of Her Majesty QE2 perceiving it totally wrong.

Drew,
What is the curved sliver of metal to the right of your clock?

Bill made a .038" thick curved segment which I affix to the table with a C clamp and use to zero the gauge. Works great.

Damascus: I'll let someone within the profession explain personal injury law in the U.S. However, as has been expressed on previous threads regarding a U.S. proof house, most of us have a profound lack of confidence that our moral and intellectual superiors in Washington would not confuse 'safe' with 'it's black and plastic so it's evil' and then decline to prove, and effectively ban, those guns that are not 'good'.

Drew,
Thank you.
Just to throw a little common sense into the ring, yes we can have guns that safely pass the 'proof' procedure with barrel walls as thin as 0.015", but are you comfortable weilding a gun with walls that thin? Are you comfortable buying a gun with walls that thin to just stand and admire it or just occasionally shoot it? I like guns that are sound and shootable.

Here we're free to modify our guns as we see fit.

The word 'tamper' does not, thankfully, apply because it infers lack of authorization..


tam�per
verb
interfere with (something) in order to cause damage or make unauthorized alterations.


Some of us still have problems with 'authority'. It seems to be our basic nature here.

The accidents I've seen reported seem to not be directly related to irresponsible metal removal, but rather to operator error of some type.

You can hardly blame the gun or modifications thereto when a failure is caused by an obstruction or a loading error.

How do you 'proof' a shooter? Mistakes happen, just like in any endeavor. There are no examples of manmade things that have not failed catastrophically at one time or another. You get on the Titanic, you drive over a bridge, you put a shell in a gun.... you take your chances.

Engineers can't, experts aren't, and people are just people.

"... a totally unrecognizable genie has once again unbuttoned his pants and urinated on the pillar of science." - E.K. Gann

As shotgunjones pointed out, with very few exceptions we are free to modify our firearms as we wish. The exceptions typically have to do with alterations that might change a weapon's regulatory status as a so-called "assault rifle", machine gun, short-barreled rifle, sawed-off shotgun, etc. There is no law whatsoever (that I am aware of) that concerns itself with the safety of alterations or modifications of firearms.

Concerning torts (negligence), I am not sure a person who alters a firearm necessarily owes a duty of care to a person who later uses that firearm. It would depend on the situation and circumstances. In any case the plaintiff must have actually suffered a loss or injury and be able to prove that it was caused by a failure (of the defendant) to exercise reasonable care. Assumption of risk would likely be a defense, as second-hand firearms are typically sold caveat emptor. Common sales terms are "sold as-is" and "it is the responsibility of the buyer to have it checked by a competent gunsmith."

Thank you for the explanations gentlemen it now explains and makes clear a lot of things I always wondered about.